by T. C. Boyle
The wind picked up and the waves pounded at them. Carrie spoke, and she was as full of fire as Katherine had ever seen her, and no, the women of America were not waiting, they were not asking, they were demanding their rights and they were demanding them now. And then Katherine spoke, the clean salt smell of the spume driving down the sour reek of the tomato pinned to her breast like a scarlet letter, and she wouldn’t wipe it away, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She spoke extempore and afterward she couldn’t remember what she’d said, but she remembered the feeling of it, the intensity and exhilaration of doing battle, of thrusting her words like bayonets into the very heart of the crowd that gathered on the shore to hear them.
“Go back to your husband!” some idiot shouted just before the storm broke—the literal one, with all its fierce lashing of wind and rain and even hail, the one that emptied the beach till she was preaching to the dumb sand and the oblivious gulls and the sisters who’d linked hands with her. My husband, she thought, and they were singing the “Marseillaise” there in the wind and the rain and the surf, singing “For All the Saints,” my husband might as well not even exist.
Afterward, when they’d staggered out of the surf and darted barefoot up the beach like so many schoolgirls at a picnic interrupted by a shower, they were giddy and heedless, the laughter running through them like a spark firing the engine of their exhilaration over and over again, and the pulse of it kept them giggling and grinning and thrusting their ecstatic faces at one another as the chauffeurs squeezed them dripping and shivering into Mrs. Littlejohn’s twin Pierce Arrow sedans, a Cadillac touring car and a Chalmers Six loaned for the day by an invalid neighbor of Mrs. Littlejohn who was highly sympathetic to the cause. And of the two women who’d spontaneously joined them in the surf, one—Delia Bumpus, proprietress of a rooming house in Quincy—came along for the celebratory ride back to Mrs. Littlejohn‘s, a bona fide convert. She was a robust woman, huge above her stockings, and her laugh was contagious as they piled out of the cars and gathered round the fire in the drawing room in a flurry of tea things, blankets, towels and warm terry robes provided by a whole army of servants. “I thought you were all crazy,” she roared, lifting her skirts to the fire, “and I was right!”
Everyone laughed at that and ten voices flew into the breach, shrill with excitement. “Did you see the look on that sheriff’s face when Carrie read him the riot act?”
“My God, yes!”
“I thought he was going to die of a stroke right there—”
“He must have been seventy.”
“Seventy? He was a hundred if he was a day—”
“What? You didn’t recognize him? Methuselah’s grandfather?”
Laughter and applause.
“Let me tell you, if he was the only unregenerate male standing between us and the vote I would blow him over myself, just like this—poof!”
More laughter, percolating round the delicate china cups of beef tea and orange pekoe blend. The fire leapt and snapped, women sank into armchairs in a sisterhood of splayed limbs and neatly balanced cups and saucers, a faint scent of woodsmoke charged the air and everything seemed laminated with the intensity of a waking dream, the cut flowers glowing with an aniline light, the oil paintings hanging above their heads like halos, and as the kitchen staff piled a table high with cold cuts, toast points and caviar, plums and raspberries from the orchard, the storm beat deliciously at the windows and shook the floorboards beneath their feet. Katherine, the hair hanging wet in her face as she rubbed at it with a towel that smelled like sunshine on the grass, felt like a girl again—she might have been in the gymnasium at Miss Hershey’s School after calisthenics, the sweet aching odor of girls’ sweat in the air, hard-earned sweat, sweat that was the equal of any boy’s or man’s. She was glowing, melting. She was made of india rubber, molasses, pure maple syrup settling into a mold.
“Yes, yes, yes!” came a shriek from Maybelle Harrison, wife of the textile manufacturer, caught with a piece of toast arrested halfway to her parted lips. She was standing in front of the fire, tall as any Amazon, her hair wrapped in a great white terrycloth turban. “The crowning moment for me was during Katherine’s speech, and a stirring speech it was, Katherine, really first-rate ”—cheers and applause—“because that was when Maude Park suddenly disappeared beneath one of these enormous breakers and came up spouting like a porpoise—”
They were sisters, all of them, Maybelle Harrison cheek by jowl with Lettie Strang, governess to Mrs. Littlejohn’s granddaughters, Jane Roessing exchanging pleasantries with Delia Bumpus, late of the boardinghouse, and not a thought of class or social position. This was the spirit of the Movement, the spirit of women without men, the spirit of Lysistrata and Sappho, the very scene Katherine had dreamed of when she’d joined the nascent women’s club at MIT, striding through the door and into the embrace of three trembling doelike creatures as bewildered and uncertain as she and yet no less determined. She stretched luxuriously and cradled the hot cup in her hands, rain tapping at the windows, the flow of laughter and conversation ebbing and flooding round her, and thought, This is the way the world should be.
But it wasn‘t, and no one knew that better than she.
There was no sanctuary, no enchanted castle, no safe haven full of fine things and exulting women, not unless you built it yourself. And you didn’t build it yourself, you couldn‘t, not when you were fourteen and as dependent on your father as he was on his capricious God in His capricious heavens. Because that was how old she was, fourteen, when the world of men came crashing down on her, pillars, buttresses, scaffolding and all.
It was in the spring, a month or so after the chess club fiasco, and the carriage had just brought her home from school (there was no reason to stay late anymore, and Mr. Gregson couldn’t seem to look her in the face no matter what she did to please him, as if she were the one in the wrong). Her mother was out—at a tea someplace, or maybe it was a charity function—and her brother Samuel was away at Harvard. The house was unnaturally quiet, the servants in the kitchen, the cats asleep in the window. She was reading—Middlemarch, and she remembered the book to this day—puzzling over Dorothea Brooke and her thirst for learning that was so all-consuming as to allow her to throw herself away on a crabbed sexless old mummy like Casaubon, when there was a thump in the front hallway, as if someone had thrown open the door and tossed a sack of meal on the carpet. The cats raised their heads. Katherine set down her book. And there is was again, louder now, more distinct, as if a second sack had been flung against the wall and then rebounded off the first. Curious more than anything—all she could think of was her mother and a pair of shopboys with a new purchase that was too bulky to bring up the back stairway—she eased into her slippers and went to the door to investigate.
It wasn’t her mother. There were no shopboys, no sacks of meal, no china cabinets or ottomans wrapped in brown paper. When she pulled open the door to the hallway she saw her father there, leaning into the wall and clenching his teeth in a grimace of almost maniacal concentration, as if he were trying to push his way through the wainscoting; behind him, the outer door stood open to the soft haze of the sun and the branches of the budding trees along the street. “Father?” she said, more puzzled than alarmed—she’d never in her life known him to come home from the office before six. “Are you all right?”
He turned his face from the wall then and fastened his eyes on her, and it was the strangest thing but she couldn’t hear anything in that moment, not the noise of the traffic in the street or the shouts of the children on the lawn next door—it was as if she’d gone deaf. But then a single noise began to intrude on her consciousness, the harsh abrasive grinding of his teeth, bone on bone, as loud suddenly as the rumble of a gristmill. She started toward him, no time for thought or wonder or even fear, her arms outstretched to receive him, bundle him, protect him, and all at once the wall heaved and threw him out into the center of the hallway on legs that had gone dead, and he was lurching pas
t her in a blind stagger, already reaching out with his useless hands for the door to the library.
This was her father, Wirt Dexter, one of the great jurisprudential minds of his time, son of the founder of Dexter, Michigan, grandson of John Adams’s secretary of the treasury, fifty-nine years old and never sick a day in his life, Daddy, Papa, Pater, the man around whom Katherine had molded her existence like a barnacle attached to a piling sunk deep in the seabed. He was fearless, unwavering, a defender of unpopular causes, the wide-shouldered softly smiling man who would tenderly cut up her meat with a few magical strokes when she was too little to chew and who sat up with her and a storybook when she couldn’t sleep. And now, drained of color, unable to speak, his teeth grinding like two stones and his legs locked at the knee, he staggered right past her as if she’d never existed.
How he managed to twist that door handle and slip inside the door and lock it against her, she would never know, but it was one of the bravest things she’d ever seen, an act of will so monumental it awed her to this day even as the hurt of it rose like bile in her throat. The door slammed. She found her voice. “Father!” she cried, pounding at the door. “Daddy, Daddy!”
“Go away! ” he growled, “damn you, get away! ” And then she heard him on the carpet, thrashing across the floor like a dog shot between the shoulders, the lamp crashing over and the servants there in the hallway with their frightened faces, Mrs. Muldoon and Nora and Olga, and no hope in all the world because he was dying, dying behind that locked door so as to spare her, his daughter, his Katherine.
They buried him, and a month later her mother informed her they’d be leaving Chicago as soon as she could make the arrangements. And where were they going? To Boston, to be near Samuel, who was the hope of the family now. And he was, Samuel, a great hope, a great man ab ovo, his father in miniature, hard-working, right-thinking, serious, magnetic, older and wiser at twenty-one than most men at thirty or even forty, as sure of his career in the public weal as any Dexter before him. Katherine was bereft. She didn’t know what to do. She was fourteen years old. She went to Boston with her mother—a provincial place, pinched and fastidious, choked in the stranglehold of society—and clung to the pillar of her handsome and accomplished older brother while the tide rose and the sea rushed in. And that was all right, the best she could do, until one afternoon four years later Samuel developed a sudden fever, broke out in a purple rash that made him look as if he’d been pounded all over with a hammer, and died before morning.
“Katherine? Are you with us?”
She looked up from her tea and the room was there in all its solidity and permanence, the smell of wet hair, women’s hair, and of cake and woodsmoke and beef broth, and she was back in the present and flashing Jane Roessing a triumphal smile. “Just tired,” she said. “Or not tired exactly—more the way I feel after a long walk in the woods. Relaxed. Calm. And yet exhilarated too.”
“Wordsworthian?”
Katherine laughed. “Sure, emotion recollected in tranquility and all that. But I feel more like Lucy Stone or Alice Paul at the moment.” She slid over on the sofa and patted the cushion beside her.
Jane folded her skirts under her and sat lightly in the spot indicated. She was from Philadelphia, about Katherine’s age, and had married a man considerably older, a manufacturer of some sort who’d been a champion of women’s rights—when he died, eight years ago, he left her everything. Ever since, she’d put all her energy and resources into the Movement, traveling around the country and helping to organize local chapters, and in the spring she’d been in Washington with Inez Milholland for the great protest march. They had dozens of friends in common, but for one reason or another Katherine had never met her till the previous evening at Mrs. Littlejohn’s dinner reception. She’d liked her right away. Jane was a dynamo, one of those bustling energetic women who seem to be so much taller than they actually are, always alert, always amused, bobbing and weaving through Mrs. Littlejohn’s parlor under a mass of rust-colored hair that stood up buoyantly from her scalp no matter the pressure of hat, comb or pin. Her eyes were the faintest palest most delicate shade of green, like a Song dynasty vase, and she always managed to look self-possessed and wise—not in the way of accumulated wisdom, not necessarily, but in the way of the prankster, the class clown, the girl with the sharpest tongue in school.
“Carrie showed me the newspaper piece,” she said, reaching for her hair with both hands as if to gather it all in, section by section, as if she were winnowing a bush for berries. “It was really quite touching, I thought—the parts about you, I mean.” She paused. Let her green gaze sweep the room and then come back again. “You must have suffered.”
Katherine bowed her head. It was the first expression of sympathy she’d heard in years and it made her want to weep aloud, beat her breast, lay her head in the lap of the woman beside her and sob till all the hurt and antipathy of the McCormicks and their minions was drained from her, all the fierceness of the struggle with Stanley and his keepers and the burden of Riven Rock, the desolation of being a wife without a husband, forever the odd one out at this gathering or that. (Mrs. McCormick, they called her, Mrs. McCormick, shall I haila cab for you? and what a joke that was.) She couldn’t respond. She tried, but nothing came out.
Jane was sitting right beside her now and she could smell the exotic rich dampness of the roots of her hair and feel the warmth of the thigh pressed to hers and somehow Jane’s arm was resting on her shoulder and Jane was rocking her, ever so gently, till all she could think of was the skiff she’d had as a girl on Lake Michigan and the softest of breezes that would come all the way from Minnesota or Canada just to set it atremble, just to rock her.
“Listen,” Jane murmured, turning her face to her, and all the other women in that room might as well have been on another planet for all Katherine was aware of them, “I know what you’re going through, I do. When Fred died I was only twenty-five, with no children and both my parents gone, and his family treated me like some sort of criminal, like I was the one who’d given him heart disease and no matter that he was nearly sixty and had had two heart attacks already. To them I was an outsider and nothing more, and when the will was read that room was like a pot boiling over, and if looks could kill—”
Jane gave her a final pat, shifted away from her and bent forward to dig through her purse. Katherine was stunned. It was as if this woman beside her had read her deepest thoughts, as if they’d inherited the same set of unfeeling moneygrubbing in-laws, as if... but that was enough. Her husband was alive still, and there would come a day when he recovered and they were perfectly happy, like any other couple.
“Sorry to get so maudlin.” Jane had straightened up and eased back into the chair and she held something now in her hand, something that glittered in the light of the fire. It was a cigarette case, Katherine saw, silver, with Jane’s initials—J.B.R.—inlaid in gold across the facing. “Do you smoke?” Jane asked in the most casual voice in the world.
“Smoke?” Katherine had barely recovered herself. “You must be joking.”
“No, not at all,” and Katherine watched the unfolding ritual with fascination, the neatly sprung case, the tamped cigarette, the flare of the match and finally the long slow inhalation that drew tight the flesh of Jane’s throat as if she were taking in the very breath of life itself. “How is it,” Jane began, the blue vapor escaping her lips and nostrils in pale wisps, its odor sweet and harsh at the same time, like the smell of leaves burning in the gutter, “how is it that men can smoke in public and women can’t?”
“Well,” and Katherine looked round to see that every woman in the room was making an effort not to stare, “it’s just not done, not in our set anyway. Maybe among seamstresses and such—”
Jane lifted her eyebrows. “And in Paris?”
“That’s entirely different.”
“Oh?” And there was that sly look, the look of the girl who circumvented all the rules and sent clever notes up and down the a
isles when the teacher’s back was turned. “You know”—exhaling again—“I think the thing that most irritates me about the whole little dominion of men and their precious vote and their property rights and all the rest is how illogical it is, how smug and self-serving, using our sex against us—‘Oh, it’s not ladylike to smoke.’ Well, is it ladylike to vote, wear trousers, mount a bicycle? Is it ladylike to pay property taxes like any other citizen and stand by at election time and watch some illiterate from Ballyshannon step up to the ballot box—or worse, sell his vote for two shots of rye whiskey? Hm?”
The buzz of conversation had died momentarily in the wake of Jane’s putting fire to that little tube of compacted leaves and bringing it to her lips, but now it started up again, a whole clamor of voices.
“Look, it’s clearing,” someone observed.
“Oh, is it?”
“Yes, look over there, out over the water.”
“Just in time for fireworks—we will have fireworks, won’t we, Lavinia?”
Katherine tried to compose herself. Why was she so upset? She’d been in the presence of woman smokers more times than she could count—in Paris, Geneva, Vienna. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said finally, focusing on those mocking green eyes, “but the vote is one thing—even the issue of trousers or bicycles or the ridiculous practice of riding sidesaddle—and yet a personal habit that many, male and female, might find objectionable—”
“Have you ever tried one?”
Was she blushing? Thirty-eight years old and blushing like a schoolgirl? She was remembering those summers in Switzerland, at Prangins, and Lisette. “Well, to tell the truth,” and suddenly she was giggling, “yes, yes I have.”